Poultry slaughter under the spotlight.

This week has been much exercised by chickens. Not how they live or are farmed... rain forests of newsprint and many terabytes of digital space has been taken up with that recently, but how they die. Following a very high profile campaign by the TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall there has been a significant increase in sales of free range birds in supermarkets.

You might remember that Mr Fearnely Whittingstall set up his own experiment where he kept one flock of birds in a shed, and another flock in free range conditions and compared the kind of lives the two birds had. One thing which perhaps passed unoticed, although it was mentioned in the programme, was that at the end of their lives the chickens, both fee range and shed reared, or broilers, met the same end at the same slaughter plant.

Now questions are being asked about whether the slaughtering process is as humane as it could be. If you're squeamish please look away now. This is how it works... The birds normally arrive at the slaughterhouse in crates, from which they are unloaded. They are then placed upside down into shackles from which they hang by their feet. These shackles move along a conveyor, in a fashion which is not dissimilar to a car plant. Upside down, their head is immersed in an electrified water bath. The chicken completes an electrical circuit; a massive current is designed to render the bird unconscious.

One of the concerns is whether this always happens, and whether some of the birds are only partially stunned, and maybe still conscious when they move to the next stage of the process which is where their throats are cut by a machine with a series of rotating knives. Death under this method actually occurs through bleeding.

The Farm Animal Welfare Council which advises the government has been carrying out an inquiry into the way that white meat species are slaughtered, and the first conclusions of the working group chaired by Professor David Henderson have started to emerge. According to Compassion in World Farming which was present at an open meeting addressed by Prof Henderson, there are worries both about the shackling and about the way that the electrical water stunning baths actually work, or sometimes don’t.

The worry which CIWF has about the shackling is that in some plants, according to them, the birds can spend several minutes in an unnatural position upside down before they are stunned. According to the lobby group this can be worse in some of the larger plants where up to a hundred birds a minute are killed and the actual killing lines can wind around the plant before the birds are stunned. CIWF says that not only is, being held upside down by their feet an unnatural position for the birds to be held, it can also be very painful as it can exacerbate leg and foot problems which may have been caused by the way they were reared.

There are also worries about whether every bird receives enough current to properly stun it. Every chicken is different, in size and electrical resistance, and this may effect how much current it gets. CIWF also says that sometimes by flapping their wings the wingtips of the birds actually hit the electrified water first, something which according to `Compassion' is very painful, and causes them to recoil their necks thus missing the stunning bath.

An alternative to electrical stunning is the use of gas. This is used to kill the birds, and renders the unconscious in the process. This isn’t a poison as we would think of it, but an inert gas such as Nitrogen or Argon which simply deprives the bird of oxygen. Dr Mohan Raj of Bristol University told me that when Michael Portillo, the former politician turned TV presenter made a programme about `How to kill a human’ hypoxia, or the deprivation of the brain of oxygen was probably the least unpleasant way to die!

This is in effect what is happening with gassing. The birds are put into a chamber which is then pumped full of either pure argon or pure nitrogen, which is, for the purposes of killing considered inert. A mixture of thirty percent Carbon Dioxide and either Nitrogen or Argon may also be used. The birds are deprived of oxygen and die. When they are unconscious, and the brain ceases to operate, they will continue to move, thrash around even, but this is purely a nerve response, according to scientists, the same as cutting the head off a chicken. One advantage of this system is that the birds can be killed without having to be removed from the crates in which they arrived at the plant.
There is some concern though within the industry that in the process of this automatic response, the birds can damage their wings, and this can reduce the value of the carcass. However the bigger stumbling block to the widespread use of gassing is the capital cost of the equipment, something in the region of hundreds of thousands of pounds to replace the existing lines. Fine if those lines are life expired, but beyond the reach of companies using lines with many years of life left. The change is happening though, and about a quarter of chickens, and most turkeys killed for food in the country are now gassed.

It will be interesting to see whether the concerns about how chicken live will be duplicated when the FAWC report is published this autumn looking at how they die. One problem is that by looking at the label it’s now easy to see how a chicken lived its life. It’s almost impossible to know how it met its end.